Research
Dr. Jayant Sirohi has focused his research on determining the most effective and efficient way to build tiny unmanned aircraft that can fly off and complete missions on its own. For the past two years, Sirohi has been developing, building and testing prototypes to find the most efficient design for
Research
Micro Air Vehicles are tiny, hovering bots that have been deployed for battlefield reconnaissance. But they’re still as limited as they are small. MAVs can’t really navigate urban environments or maintain a stable hover when the wind suddenly shifts. ”Get them among buildings or give them something to
Payloads
The US Army just handed out a half-dozen contracts to firms to find faces from above, track targets, and even spot “adversarial intent.” “If this works out, we’ll have the ability to track people persistently across wide areas,” says Tim Faltemier, the lead biometrics researcher at Progeny Systems Corporation,
Research
The General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab at the University of Pennsylvania just posted this impressive video of their latest work in planning and control for heterogeneous quadrotor teams in environments with obstacles. The work was done by Daniel Mellinger, Alex Kushleyev, and Vijay Kumar. Mid-sized Quad was
News
The Guardian UK's Owen Bowcott joins Professors Jim Scanlan and Andy Keane from the University of Southampton, who are developing data-gathering unmanned aircraft for commercial and civilian use. The video also features the 3D printer built aircraft that we first featured on August 1. Source: Guardian Media Group
Events
This year competition includes not only unmanned air vehicles but unmanned ground vehicles as well. The format of the competition will build on the success of the UAV competitions held in 2007, 2009 and 2011 and will keep expanding through the involvement of UGVs. There are two competitions running together
Events
The International Micro Air Vehicle Conference (IMAV 2011) which was held in the Netherlands last week, also featured a series of indoor and outdoor competitions. Winner of the KLPD user trophy (Best operational MAV) was the Akaflieg Team from the Academic flight club Bremen, Germany. Full results are available here.
Applications & Testing & Experience
Researchers at the Modern Technologies Engineering Collage of Tabriz University developed an unmanned aircraft, called the Shaparak (butterfly), which can fly at 15,000 feet and has a range of 20 km. One of the designers of the aircraft said that the long period of constant flying at high altitudes
Control Stations & Remote Video Terminals
UAS already beam thousands of hours of video to intelligence analysts manning multiple screens and send information directly to soldiers in the field. This dramatic growth is leading to information overload. It won't stop there: the military wants individual soldiers not only to drive tanks, watch for enemies
Applications & Testing & Experience
The aerospace industry’s Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation & Assessment (ASTRAEA) programme is about to test wireless communication system designed to allow a UAS to securely send video footage and other information to its ground-based operator at the highest possible speed, even when it is out of direct
Research
SkyNET is a stealth network that connects hosts to a botmaster through a mobile drone. The network is comprised of machines on home Wi-Fi networks in a proximal urban area, and one or more autonomous attack drones. The SkyNET is used by a botmaster to command their botnet(s) without
News
Boeing just released this video of engineer George Windsor in a small room at a Boeing building in Seattle using an iPhone to control a small UAS that was hovering over a baseball field on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts – some 3,000 miles away. Students